Peter Bassill — latest writing on cyber security
Latest articles · page 10 of 14
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Carrying the pager: a list, not a manifesto
Things you can only learn by being woken up by them. Plain language. No revelations promised.
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Setting Up WireGuard VPN on Ubuntu
WireGuard is the VPN that replaced everything else on my network. Server setup, client configuration, DNS leak prevention, and kill switches.
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From prepositioning to action
Iran has shifted its UK-facing cyber activity from quiet infrastructure presence to operational disruption. The NCSC's August advisory on Salt Typhoon names three Chinese firms. The trajectory of 2025 is no longer ambiguous.
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Determinism and regulatory defensibility, eighteen months later
Post 14 of the AI series. The bit-identical-inference property I wrote about in 2024 is showing up in regulatory drafting. What the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill drafting work suggests about how regulators are going to evaluate AI-driven security decisions.
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Carrying the pager, revisited
A reflection on a year of mature incident-response practice — what carrying the on-call pager has taught me about the shape of leadership, the cost of not training your successor, and what the work actually looks like at three in the morning.
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Setting Up Pi-hole for Home DNS Filtering
Pi-hole turns a spare machine into a network-wide ad and tracker filter. Every device benefits without any of them needing individual configuration.
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The thing an accreditation cannot do
I have sat on the CREST European Council since 2022. This is what the work has taught me about what accreditation can and cannot do, and why I think the next chapter is harder than the last.
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Synnovis, a year on
One year after the Qilin ransomware attack on Synnovis took NHS pathology services in south-east London offline, what did we actually learn — and what is still unfixed?
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Agents in production, eighteen months on
Post 13 of the AI series. The agent demos at RSA and Black Hat have got slicker. The agent in production cyber operations has, mostly, not arrived. The honest 18-month read on a category whose marketing has run ahead of its engineering.
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Configuring UFW Firewall Rules on Ubuntu
UFW is the sane front-end to iptables. This tutorial covers default-deny policies, service rules, rate limiting, logging, and the Docker gotcha that breaks all of it.
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What the retail wave actually cost
M&S resumed online orders this week after 46 days offline. Co-op is counting £206m. Harrods got off relatively lightly. Three compromises, one actor, one Easter weekend — and a lesson UK retail boards are still digesting.
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Cross-tenant intelligence: the privacy architecture problem
Post 12 of the AI series. The architecture that turns one customer's experience into another's protection — without exposing either to the other. The privacy engineering problem nobody in the LLM space is talking about, and EmilyAI's seven principles.
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Continuous learning at scale
Post 11 of the AI series. EmilyAI has been learning from analyst feedback for six years. The LLM-as-frozen-artefact shape gets the operational properties of *the model that improves over time* structurally wrong. What that means in practice.
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Installing GoPhish on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Configuring DNS for Phishing Simulation
Deploy GoPhish with Postfix on Ubuntu, configure SPF, DKIM, DMARC, CAA and SRV records for your sending domains, and import campaign templates.
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Computer Use and the operator question
Post 10 of the AI series. Anthropic's Computer Use, OpenAI's Operator, Google's Project Astra. The category where AI literally moves the mouse. What this shape changes for cyber operations — and how it reads against EmilyAI's tighter action vocabulary.